RE: (TV) four for four

["Leo Casey" <LeoCasey@comcast.net>]

Hey Jesse,

You should write more often......or are you still slaving away on that PhD?

Leo

np: "American Stars and Bars" 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: tv-owner@obbard.com [mailto:tv-owner@obbard.com] On 
> Behalf Of Jesse Hochstadt
> Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 6:05 PM
> To: tv@obbard.com
> Subject: Re: (TV) four for four
> 
> I've always found The Wonder to be the weakest of Tom's solo 
> records - a big disappointment after the stunning Flash 
> Light. Only Words from the Front comes close. The Wonder has 
> some good songs, but that reviewer is right: the production's 
> weak. Phil's comparison to the 1992 Television album is 
> pretty apt: the production on that is dry to the point of 
> near-sterility. Those songs come much more alive in concert.
> 
> On Neil Young: I've never been able to get as much into Neil 
> as I might like, partially because of the sheer volume of 
> material that's built up over the years. But at his best, 
> he's quite remarkable and moving. I have a particular 
> weakness for some of his songs that are just stompers, like 
> "C'mon Baby Let's Go Downtown" and "When You Dance." (The 
> latter doesn't really stomp, but it ... pounds? Someone help 
> me with a verb here.) I don't tend to think of his guitar 
> playing as being as technically developed or thoughtful as 
> Tom's or (for certain) Richard Thompson's, but it seems like 
> he can sometimes get to similar places by more primitive 
> means. And maybe that primitivism is an illusion....
> 
> Neil's also got that great one-note guitar solo in, what is 
> it, Down by the River? (I'm in a cafe where music's playing, 
> so it's hard for me to pull songs up clearly in my head.) 
> There's a list for you: great one-note guitar solos. I think 
> XTC's "Love at First Sight," one of my fave raves, has one too.
> 
> On British folk: As a big Richard Thompson fan, I know less 
> of this stuff than I should. I have all or almost all of 
> RT-era Fairport; some Sandy; one John Martyn (and need more), 
> if he's folk; several Nick Drakes; and much of the original 
> Pentangle stuff. Pentangle at its best is just phenomenal. 
> I'm insanely in love with "John Donne Song" - which is really 
> a John Renbourn solo number - whose beautiful melody and the 
> brilliance of Donne's language disguised its misogyny for me 
> until a friend and I dissected the lyrics. I'd like to get 
> more Jansch and Renbourn stuff if I knew where to start.
> 
> But as for Shirley Collins, I have "No Roses" and "Folk 
> Routes, New Routes" and I'm afraid I just don't dig her 
> singing. I respect her place in history, her work with Alan 
> Lomax, etc., but there's something about her vocal timbre 
> that feels wrong to me - a little thin, somehow? Gimme Linda 
> Thompson (whom I actually prefer to Sandy Denny) any day. 
> Which reminds me: I don't know June Tabor's or Norma 
> Waterson's work well at all. And I still want to know more 
> about the not-so-long-ago deceased Davy Graham (the British 
> Sandy Bull?).
> 
> Any of you familiar with the oeuvre of Irish guitarist John 
> Doyle? I first noticed his playing on Linda Thompson's 
> "Fashionably Late." I have his record "Evening Comes Early" 
> and while it sometimes descends into the merely pretty (if 
> still very accomplished), the best of it, like "Pretty Saro" 
> and "Early in the Spring," is transcendent. Like most folk 
> tunes, the latter seems to have variations in the lyrics; the 
> versions I'm finding on-line end with "If the girl is married 
> whom I adore/I'm sure I'll stay on land no more." But Doyle's 
> version ends with something fiercer and more resentful (I'm 
> not home right now to check the lyric sheet) in which the 
> narrator talks about returning to the sea and having the 
> waves crash over him, and Doyle's musical arrangement does a 
> powerful job of evoking the rise and fall of massive ocean waves. 
> 
> Martin Simpson, blah blah blah....
> 
> Can you tell I'm avoiding working?
> 
> - Jesse
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